Some Good News Stories

Saw this elsewhere and brought a smile to my face...

Irish government to spray streets with flat 7up in an attempt to eradicate coronavirus.
* story may not be 100% true
 
I meant to post this before.

I ordered plants online from Mr Middleton Garden Shop in the Spring. Its website displayed a notice that there would be long delays in delivering orders.

I didn’t mind because I had to sort out and prepare a disgusting area in my back garden. This patch I stubbornly called a flower bed despite all rational evidence to the contrary.

Anyway, I eventually I got it sorted and when the plants arrived, I noticed an additional packet which contained two bulbs of beautiful dahlias, called Kaleidoscope, with a note: -

COVID-19. Thank you for supporting Mr Middleton Garden Shop at this difficult time in our history. This is a small gift from the team as a small gesture of thanks.

Just two plants, but they made my day.

Apparently, the online shop saved its business. It was wiped out with orders for vegetable seeds.
 
Some weeks ago I saw pictures from an international rugby match in New Zealand where it appears nobody in the crowd of 30,000 was wearing a face mask. Earlier I saw this:-


An international rugby match in Sydney where it appears nobody is wearing a face mask either.

What is it the Australians and New Zealanders did in the battle against Covid? Can it be done in Ireland?
 
What is it the Australians and New Zealanders did in the battle against Covid? Can it be done in Ireland?

They made full advantge of their island status, restricted incoming flights, actual enforcement of quarantine etc
As well as regional lockdowns whenever an outbreak did occur.

In Ireland, things are complicated by membership of EU and land border with the North.
Even then. we didn't even do anything about non-EU people coming in from America where we would have had more leeway.
 
They made full advantge of their island status, restricted incoming flights, actual enforcement of quarantine etc
As well as regional lockdowns whenever an outbreak did occur.

Australia even prevented 10's of thousands of their own citizen's from returning home.
 
A nice touch from Ajax FC to their season ticket holders...

Ajax have melted down their Eredivisie trophy in order to share the title with supporters who missed out on the success because of the coronavirus pandemic. The newly crowned Dutch league winners have created over 42,000 "champion stars" from the silverware, which will be distributed to the club's season-ticket holders. Each star weighs 3.45 grams, 0.06 of which has come from the trophy.

 
I didn't know where else to put this, it's more a 'weird story to come out of Covid' ... saw it in New Scientist and thought ok this is clever but maybe we can come up with a more reliable way :)

Negative Amazon reviews of scented candles may indicate the number of covid-19 cases in the community and could even predict infection spikes.
Viral Twitter posts have suggested that Amazon reviews for highly scented products could highlight the extent in the population of anosmia,
or a loss of smell, a key covid-19 symptom. To learn more, Nick Beauchamp at Northeastern University, Massachusetts, and his colleagues analysed 9837 Amazon reviews of four best-selling scented candles produced by the brand Yankee Candle. All were posted between September 2018 and December 2021.
They noted the number of reviews that said the candles had no smell and compared them with reported covid-19 cases in the US.
The research “started out as a joke”, says Beauchamp, however, the team found a link between covid-19 cases and negative candle reviews. For every 100,000 new covid-19 cases a week in the US over the study period, the number of Yankee Candle reviews saying the product had no smell went up by 0.25 percentage points. A statistical analysis revealed this link wasn’t a chance finding...
The team presented the work at the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media in June.
 
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